1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communication systems and more particularly to communication systems used to poll an audience during a presentation.
2. Description of Related Art
When addressing an audience, a speaker may want to poll the audience for responses to question he has posed and he may wish to answer questions posed by the audience. Current audience polling devices do not transmit any information about the audience members who responded to the poll. This leads to a dilemma: if the audience is self-selected then the polling results may be strongly biased, but there is no way to determine this fact without additional polling to retrieve demographic data, a process which is tedious at best and, given human nature, unreliable. Answering questions posed from the audience also presents several problems. An audience member with a question must shout out the question, move to a microphone or wait for a microphone to be passed to him. Additionally, the speaker has little control over which audience members ask questions beyond randomly selecting them to avoid chaos. This may lead to a situation where irrelevant, repetitive, boring, and self-serving questions are asked of the speaker which results in an information-poor exchange between the speaker and the general audience.
Magnetic stripe readers are known which allow for the transfer of digitally encoded information from the stripe to a computing device. This technology allows an individual to provide information upon demand to any reader-enabled device.
IR transceivers are also known which allow for the transfer of digitally encoded information between two computing devices. Acting as an input/output communications interface, IR transceivers allow for wireless connectivity.
Wireless microphones allow for the transmission of analog voice data between a the microphone and a central control unit which, in turn, normally forwards to signal to a public address system. A wireless microphone may be activated by an operator of the central unit by sending it a signal or the microphone may always be "live". Typically different wireless microphones operate on different frequencies.
The digital transmission of data over a radio link is also well known. Various techniques are employed to prevent transmissions from different computing devices using the same frequency from interfering with each other. Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) is widely employed in both wireless radio applications and in wired computer networks. This technology is well-understood and widely deployed.